What Is A Teaser Bet?

A Teaser bet is only allowed as part of a parlay or accumulator combination bet. It is an American betting term that is not used much, if at all, in the UK or Europe. A Teaser applies when you are making up a parlay of bets with points spreads. It is when you change the point spread to give your bet a better chance of winning. This known as “teasing” the point spread. Obviously if you change the spread to your advantage then the betting odds will reduce as your team has a better chance of making the bet.

With a Teaser bet you take the standard point spread that the sportsbook is offering to make the betting more even, say:

Standard point spread bet offered:

If you make up your parlay of the two games above and you choose to bet on Phoenix Suns -3pts and Los Angeles Lakers -6.5pts then your betting slip may look like this:

You are about to place a parlay on these two eventualities. You have taken the standard point spreads. They are standard because they are the point spreads that are designed to make the games even in terms of betting probability (ie: the sportsbooks give the weaker team in each game a points advantage to even out the game and to be able to even out the betting and make it more competitive).

However you may want to make that points spread even more advantageous to your chosen team. This is called “teasing” the bet and so you will be creating a Teaser bet:

Look at the screenshot above. Using the drop-down menu below each of your selections you can now ‘tease’ the bets. When you click that drop-down menu there are a multitude of different points spreads to choose from. In the betting slip above you can see that we have changed / teased the odds on the Suns winning. They were 10/11 odds with – 3pts to win the game. Now we have changed the point spread to +1pt. Instead of having to defy a 3pt disadvantage, they will now start the game with a 1pt advantage. As we have made this team’s task so much easier (easier by 4pts), the odds have reduced to 4/9.

We have also teased the second leg of our parlay by giving the Lakers a 4pt advantage over the standard odds on offer (they now start their game -2.5pts rather than -6.5pts).

You can see that if we have a $1 bet on Suns +1pts and Lakers -2.5pts we will win $1.07 for our $1 stake. Our return if both legs of the teased parlay do win will be $2.07 ($1.07 winnings + $1 stake returned).

To summarize a Teaser Bet

A teaser bet is when you change the points spreads to your advantage, which has the natural consequence of the betting odds reducing, and it is part of a parlay.